Fermilab Earth Day Fair - today in Wilson Hall atrium

The ESH&Q Earth Day Fair takes place today from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Wilson Hall atrium. Swing by to learn how you can be a good steward of the Earth. There will be giveaways and a chance to win raffle items.

In Brief

Consider commuting by train? Take the survey

Fermilab is exploring the possibility of providing a daily shuttle to and from a nearby Metra Rail station for those commuting by train.

Shuttle transportation helps solve the "last-mile problem" faced by train commuters who, after traveling 35 miles in some cases to get to Fermilab, must figure out how to get the rest of the way from the station to the laboratory.

Using public transportation helps reduce our carbon footprint. According to the American Public Transportation Association, by taking existing public transportation instead of driving a car, a single person saves 4,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per year.

Tracking particles faster at the LHC

A new trigger system will expand what ATLAS scientists can look for during high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Image courtesy of Claudia Marcelloni, CERN

For its next big performance, the Large Hadron Collider will restart in 2015 with twice its previous collision energy and a much higher rate of particle collisions per second.

Scientists have been scurrying to prepare their detectors for the new particle onslaught. As part of this preparation, a group that includes physicists from laboratories and universities in the Chicago area are designing a new system that will allow them to examine collisions faster than ever before.

When the Large Hadron Collider is running, billions of particle collisions occur every second. Of these, only a few are the kind of direct hits that scientists are looking for. These high-impact collisions convert large amounts of pure energy into mass, temporarily producing new particles such as Higgs bosons for physicists to study.

In order to separate these rare and interesting events from the billions of less exciting collisions, scientists create complex processing systems called triggers. Trigger systems look for the most interesting collisions and record them for further analysis. Now, an international collaboration of scientists on the ATLAS experiment are creating a unique upgrade to their trigger system called the Fast Tracker, which will revolutionize how they sort collision events. Currently, scientists at Fermilab, Argonne, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago are manufacturing and testing prototypes of several component parts of the ATLAS Fast Tracker.

Renewal

The woods near Fermilab, soon after a controlled prairie burn, are ready for new growth. Photo: Ruben Carcagno, TD

The log's embers continue to glow. Ruben Carcagno, TD

In the News

Rep. Bill Foster on BICEP2 announcement

From FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News, April 18, 2014

Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) addressed the House last week on the recent announcement from the BICEP2 team regarding cosmic inflation in the early universe. Foster explained the significance of this research as follows: "This discovery by the BICEP2 team has been globally recognized as one of the most important fundamental breakthroughs in science in our lifetimes, a landmark of American academic achievement that will live on in the science textbooks forever." Federal support for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation, NASA, Department of Energy, and private industry. Foster also commented on federal funding for R&D, noting that "federal investments in research and development are at a historic low, comprising merely 3.8 percent of the federal budget or 0.8 percent of GDP."

CDF finalizes its Ωb analysis

An illustration of the final state used in the reconstruction of the Ξb0 baryon.
The data was collected by imposing requirements on the tracks in magenta.

In addition to the wide program of top quark studies performed at hadron colliders, scientists have obtained many results on the physics of particles containing bottom quarks, also known as b quarks, at these machines over the years.

Baryons are particles with three quarks, similar to protons and neutrons. The study of b baryons — baryons with at least one bottom quark — has been particularly fruitful for the hadron colliders. (Although the name might suggest otherwise, colliders known as B factories cannot produce b baryons. B factories, such as those used for the Belle and BaBar experiments, can only produce two-quark b mesons.) The discoveries and first complete reconstructions of several b baryons were made at the Tevatron.

The CDF collaboration recently released its measurements of several b baryons based on the entire Tevatron Run II data set. Scientists used several different experimental signatures that rely on the precise tracking chambers and uniform magnetic field that were the heart of the CDF detector.

Use of the full available data set increases the precision of our knowledge of several b baryons: the Λb, Ωb and Ξb. It also provides better constraints on the theory that describes particles containing heavy quarks. (As an added side effect of the b baryon program, we also obtained precise mass measurements of two baryons containing charm quarks.)

The upper figure illustrates the final state that is reconstructed for the observation and mass measurement of the particle called Ξb0. The CDF tracking system helped identify seven different tracks, which originate from four different decay points in a cascade comprising five generations of sequentially decaying particles. This rare particle was first discovered at CDF.

This analysis improved on the existing measurements of mass and lifetime for these rare states of b baryons. In particular, CDF has confirmed its mass measurement of the Ωb - and finds it to be 6,047.5 ± 3.8 (stat) ± 0.6 (syst) MeV/c2. CDF also provides the first evidence for the Ωb - decaying into the final state Ωc0π -.

Rare phenomena such as these, which appear only after the full data set from Run II is analyzed, are the fruits of the Tevatron's long run.

Pat Lukens of Fermilab is the CDF scientist responsible for this exciting new result.

In the News

Mystery of creation answered: the £2 billion telescope that will "see Big Bang"

From Yahoo! News, April 18, 2014

The first components of the biggest science experiment ever created by man are being built now — aiming to answer the biggest question of all: where the universe came from.

With a $2.7 billion budget dwarfing even the Large Hadron Collider, the Square Kilometer Array is an array of thousands of telescope dishes seeks to find an even bigger fish than a mere boson — what happened in the Big Bang.

The Square Kilometer Array is so called because it forms one huge satellite dish built to watch stars billions of light years at a resolution never achieved before. The area of the dish, spread over several continents, is a square kilometer.